Writer explores backcountry in new book

A Montana writer has published a new book.

Taut with suspense and life-or-death action, “Inaccessible” follows author Richard Layne on four solo treks into Glacier’s backcountry in near-lethal winter conditions.

“Nobody goes into the backcountry of Glacier National Park in winter,” Layne says. “It’s not a safe place to be. So no one had ever entered Hole in the Wall in winter conditions. The Park Service said it couldn’t be done.”

Layne explains that Hole in the Wall is a remote, high cirque in the park’s northwest corner guarded on all sides by sheer cliffs and avalanche chutes.

“Hole in the Wall is a worthy destination on its own,” Layne says, “but it’s also the keystone of my plan to complete a much longer trek following the Continental Divide 969 miles from Yellowstone to the U.S.-Canada border — in winter.”

The stakes are high. Traveling solo, Layne, 59, staggers under a 90-pound backpack through rotten snowpack, facing isolation, disastrous weather and utter exhaustion.

“Each winter trip into the backcountry offers a hundred ways to die,” Layne says. “A single misplaced step can send me off a 600-foot cliff; storms can make travel impossible, leaving me stranded and running out of food; avalanches rain down the mountains above me, sweeping my route; and there’s the ever-present risk of hypothermia or just plain freezing to death.”

Despite the risks, which also include hungry grizzly bears fresh from their dens and lake crossings over questionable ice, Layne rises to the challenge one step at a time in a tale that celebrates grit and courage as their own reward.

Clear, gripping prose and full-color photographs carry hardy mountaineers and armchair adventurers alike into Layne’s world of snow, solitude, and cold-sweat fear.

“I’m alone when I go into the mountains,” says Layne. “But in telling these stories, my goal is to bring the reader with me, right into the teeth of the storm, right to the edge of the precipice.”

Layne was born at home in Arkansas, on the edge of a cotton field where his father was a sharecropper. He grew up in western Montana with much of his time spent outdoors. A Vietnam veteran, he spent several years in the U.S. Army.

An avid outdoorsman with decades of backcountry experience, Layne travels in Montana’s wildlands, including Glacier National Park, primarily during winter and most often alone. Some of his trips have been noted in newspapers, magazines, and on radio and television.

For more information, visit www.farcountrypress.com or call (800) 821-3874.